Last night, I had a specific sense that I hadn't been sleeping in clover. I worried for hours and I worried about everything. I started, I think, by brooding on the inevitability of a comet striking the earth and extinguishing life as we know it. From there I moved to the collapse of the ecosyste. The earth will soon (in geological terms) be hot, waterless, and lifeless. In the nearer future, monsoons, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes and other "acts of god" will occur with increasing frequency. My pillow was hot, and the bed sheet somehow managed to tangle itself around my legs. I worried about the possibility of nuclear weapons or vials of botulism falling into the hands of jihadists. I worried about the declining population of our swifts and swallows, our frogs and toads, our bats and bees and about the certainty that the Asian longhorn beetle is about to do to the maples what the blight did to the magnificent chestnuts and the Dutch elm disease did to ulmus americanus. Not to mention the wooly adelgid that is intent on making hash of our hemlocks. I worried about the decline of the American economy, about the rebirth of bigotry and know-nothingism among the Republicans and about the pitiful fecklessness of the Democrats. I was working myself up to quite a state, sweating into my blankets. What about our radical-reactionary-interventionist supreme court? Oh my gosh, I forgot to worry about all those poor people in Haiti! At about four in the morning, I switched to more local worries: my apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, my increasing failure of memory, and my lifelong tendency toward procrastination, once resisted but now re-emerging with a vengeance. I reviewed the recent deaths and diseases among my age-cohort of friends: -- K's polycynthemia vera, R's brain tumor, S's alcoholism, J's obstructed colon, B's shingles, C's lung cancer, my brother's sudden death of stroke or embolism or who knows what it was. I thought of the friends to whom I should have been more kind, more concerned. I worried about my children and grandchildren, all apparently thriving, but you never know. I fell in and out of sleep. I got up and paced.
Toward dawn, I straightened the bedclothes, took a leak, ate some yogurt, and tried again. I woke up in a cold sweat, having dreamed that I was painfully plucking hairs out of my lips. Not hairs, exactly. More like boar's bristles. And that every handful of bristles was infested with spiders and other verminous insects. Eew, hairy lips. How disgusting.
I did not worry about dying.
Death: no more nightmares, no more insomnia, forever.
Tryptophan.
Posted by: Otis Jefferson Brown | January 27, 2010 at 05:32 PM